STARS IN THEIR EYES: Play tells little-known story of the women who changed the way we see the universe

Jody Feinberg The Patriot Ledger

Saturday

Apr 14, 2018 at 6:16 AM

Decades before female African-American mathematicians played a vital role in the early years of NASA, women made a similarly unusual contribution to astronomy. Like the 2016 film “Hidden Figures,” the new play “Women Who Mapped the Stars” raises awareness of women who defied expectations and inequities to influence a new field of science.

“These women are so inspiring to me because they faced significant odds,” said playwright Joyce Van Dyke, who received a commission to write the play from Central Square Theater, where it runs through May 20. “They didn’t always get the full credit they deserved, but they achieved truly remarkable things that have helped to shape the science that is practiced today.”

In an episode for his television show, Neil Degrasse Tyson focused on the contributions of these women to the early years of astrophysics. That caught the attention of director Jess Ernst, who first proposed the play idea to Van Dyke and developed it in workshops.

“Like most people, I’d never heard of these women when asked if I’d be interested in writing a play about them, and the minute I started learning about them I became fascinated,” said Van Dyke, who was not influenced by the film “Hidden Pictures,” which hadn’t been released yet.

Set in the Harvard Observatory in Cambridge, the play tells the story of five female astronomers who were hired as “computers” to calculate and classify data from thousands of photographic plates of stars. Set from 1879 to 1956, with a focus on 1890 to 1925, the story is factual about their accomplishments and includes some of their writings, but the dialogue and scenes are invented by Van Dyke. To show their various personalities and their influences on each other, Van Dyke had all five women working at the same time. In fact, Cecilia Page, the youngest and eventually most well known, did not overlap with several of the women.

“The play is in a way Cecilia’s search for her female forebears who built a path for her to go forward,” Van Dyke said. “There’s a progression in terms of women’s history and entrance into the field with Cecilia as the climactic figure.”

That the women were hired in the first place is because Charles Pickering, the observatory director, was very supportive of female amateur and professional astronomers, Van Dyke said. But like other men of his time, he thought women should be paid less than men and considered their work less important. While four of the five had a college education equal to men, they were not allowed to attend conferences, were required to edit other’s work, and, with the exception of one, could not use the telescope.

“They were in some ways encouraged and in other ways stymied,” said Van Dyke of Cambridge, who won the 2009 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script for her play “The Oil Thief.” “They were given opportunities for research and to develop a new classification system for the stars, but they often felt frustrated at the ways their paths were blocked.”

Much of the play’s emotion comes as these women cope with the injustices. Annie Jump Cannon, the first woman to earn an honorary degree from the University of Oxford, created the classification system of more than 250,000 stars that today is the international standard, building off of the work of two of her female co-workers and selected from nearly two dozen systems around 1910. Had she been a man, it probably would have been called the Cannon System, when in fact it’s known as the Harvard, Pickering or Draper System.

And Cecilia Page, at age 25, wrote a thesis that proposed the revolutionary idea that the sun and stars were made of hydrogen. Henry Norris Russell, dean of astrophysics at Princeton, said she was wrong, only to publish the same discovery four years later. Payne went on to become the first woman to chair the Harvard astronomy department or any Harvard department for that matter.

“He told her she was wrong! She retracted her discovery because he told her she was wrong! And now four years later he proves it himself? It’s too much, it’s just too much,” fumes astronomer Antonia Maury, one of the women most sensitive to the unfairness they faced.

Van Dyke, who also is premiering her play “Daybreak” at the off-Broadway Beckett Theatre, teaches playwriting and Shakespeare at Northeastern and Harvard. “Women Who Mapped the Stars” is the first production of The Brit d’Arbeloff Women in Science Production Series, named after the first woman to earn a mechanical engineering degree from Stanford University.

“At heart, it’s a love story, but with no romantic relationships or men, because of their love for science and the work they were doing,” Van Dyke said. “I found the story completely fascinating and hope it inspires people.”

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